White South Africa’s Election Means Nothing to Blacks

SOWETO —  White South Africa will elect a 178-member chamber of Parliament this week. To the country’s black majority, these elections might as well be in Alaska; blacks simply are not interested in them.

This white chamber of parliament effectively rules the country, with the National Party, which is the majority party, having 127 seats and the official opposition holding only 32. The election comes at a time when blacks are faced with massive unemployment (many have not worked for three years), labor disputes are growing and their townships are in turmoil and presided over by the security forces. Thousands have been detained, including many young children, and more than 2,000 have died since the unrest started in 1984.

Political commentators thus expected blacks to have an interest in the elections because of the issues being debated, and because the results of the vote will have a greater effect on black South Africa than on the rest of the country.

Instead, the townships have responded with resounding silence. Any talk of politics at the local taverns continues to be about the armed struggle waged by the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, and about the 11-month-old rent boycott. But the favorite topic is the fortunes of the two most popular soccer teams in black South Africa--the Orlando Pirates and the Kaizer Chiefs. To hear white South Africans in Johannesburg talk elections while black South Africans in nearby Soweto talk soccer, one would swear that these two intimately connected cities were continents apart.

The five white political parties in the elections are President Pieter W. Botha’s ruling National Party, the official opposition Progressive Federal Party led by Colin Eglin, the right-wing Conservative Party and the Herstigte Nasionale--the “purified” national party--led by arch conservatives Andries Treurnicht and Jaap Marais, respectively, and the New Republic Party, which has been in a state of decay for five years.

The Progressives, who to all but township residents are regarded as the liberal party in the country, have promised to give blacks everything but the vote. This is why township residents are ignoring the election. What they want, white South Africa will not give, and what white South Africa is prepared to give, they do not want. Thus the elections are a non-event. Instead, township residents increasingly look to stronger pressures as the only solution to the country’s political impasse. It is quite evident, township residents contend, that if whites still argue about the removal of petty apartheid and whether there should be reform, the country’s lawmakers do not have the ability to bring about change acceptable to the nation’s majority.

But the reasons for the lack of interest in the elections go deeper still.

First, black attitudes to white political events have been changing gradually over the years. Until recently, township residents supported the liberal parties that opposed the national government. Thus at one stage Helen Suzman, a member of Parliament and a Progressive Party spokesman on human-rights issues, was a township hero. This has changed. Blacks are fighting the government themselves; the Progressives and other liberals have become irrelevant.

Second, the graduates of the 1976 student riots now are mature township leaders. Their “power-to-the-blacks” politics have not changed. This attitude, which now pervades all of South Africa’s townships, is not one that any of the candidates are prepared to address.

Finally, since 1948, when the National Party came to power, the hysteria of white elections affected everybody, and the government got a measure of support from some conservative blacks. But even they became disillusioned after Botha’s disastrous 1985 “Rubicon” speech and his subsequent failure to reform his apartheid policies. Now Botha’s government and his party are ignored.

But what has infuriated blacks most is that the white politicians, who perceive themselves as calling for radical reforms, have said only that it is time for the government to talk to the ANC.

Blacks do not want the government to talk to the ANC. They want Botha to act-- to settle with this organization to form a government representing all of this country’s people. None of the parties in this election are even prepared to discuss such an arrangement. It would a betrayal of white interests as far as they are concerned. Whites must continue to dominate. These elections could have been a watershed in the country’s stormy history; instead, solutions to our problems still are many tortured years away.

On Thursday it will be as if the country never had an election. Pieter W. Botha will remain in power, blacks will continue to seethe in discontent, and it will be only a question of time before another mini-explosion like the ongoing black railway workers’ strike in which at least six people have been killed. In short, the communities in the country will be as separated as always and as hostile to each other as ever.